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Wednesday, September 10, 2014

In the News: KALW

Grace Evangelical Lutheran Church
sits on a quiet residential corner in the outer Sunset district of San
Francisco. Upstairs in a meeting room, a small group is gathered around
rectangular folding tables to sing Grace before they eat. The sound of a
sweetly harmonized “Amen” floats up to the rafters of the
high-ceilinged room.

Church members gather every week for a
potluck dinner with their pastor-- to share food, fellowship, and
spiritual conversation. The group has an easy familiarity with each
other; most of the congregants are older folks who have lived in the
neighborhood a long time, and have been going to this church for
decades. As they eat dinner, Pastor Megan Rohrer plays a contemporary
pop song as a launch pad for discussion.

Some heads nod to the
beat, but it’s clear that this kind of music isn’t the normal fare for
this group. The room is filled with graying heads. Then, there’s the
34-years-young pastor, who stands out for another reason, too.

“You
can kind of tell from 20 feet away that I’m genderqueer, trans, or a
big diesel dyke—which isn’t how I identify, but it’s how I look from the
outside,” says Pastor Megan Rohrer.

Rohrer was called to lead
Grace Lutheran in February 2014, becoming the first openly transgender
head or solo pastor of a Lutheran Church. But Rohrer’s path to ministry
was not an easy one.

“I grew up in Sioux Falls, South Dakota,
which is the midwest and cultural heartland of Lutherans,” says Rohrer.
“The motto [there] is like: Be in the paper when you’re born and when
you die and don’t get credit for anything in between. Because your job
is to just, like, fit in.”

But they actually found it hard to fit
in in South Dakota. A word about pronouns here: Rohrer prefers the
gender-neutral pronoun “they.” At this point in their life, they say
they feel comfortable with both male and female aspects of their
identity, and English doesn’t have a pronoun that captures that.
“It’s kind of a fascinating place to exist in the world—that people can’t really pin you down,” says Rohrer.

Rohrer
grew up religious. They say that as a child, people recognized their
gift for helping others, so ministry seemed like a good calling. But
when they came out as a lesbian while attending a Lutheran college,
religion was no longer welcoming.

“The people who were in my
religion classes with me would sing hymns when I walked by, to try to
get rid of my gay demons. And I would just sing harmony. I didn’t know
what to do,” Rohrer says.
After college, Rohrer came to identify
as transgender, and eventually found their way to a progressive Lutheran
seminary in Berkeley. They were ordained in 2006, working extensively
with homeless people and associate pastoring at several churches in San
Francisco before being called to lead Grace Lutheran Church.

Rohrer
says they know a lot of people have felt let down by traditional
churches, places that may have been un-welcoming, fundamentalist, or
judgmental.

“Identifying as trans makes people hear my sermons
differently and hear what I’m saying differently,” says Rohrer. “We do
something called ‘Bible Study That Doesn’t Suck’ online. It’s completely
normal bible study. It just has a title that says that it doesn’t suck,
which gives people the opportunity to give it a second chance --
because they think Jerry Falwell or Fred Phelps is what every Christian
believes, and you should write off all Christians.”

Finding Grace
After
going years without a permanent pastor, Grace Lutheran’s aging
congregation was dwindling. The church council at Grace was tasked with
finding a new pastor to help the congregation survive and thrive into
the future.

Sally Ann Ryan is president of the council and says Rohrer was their top choice.

“She
is so alive. So with today, but also with the past, with the Bible,”
says Ryan. “She preaches everything from the Bible and that, but it’s in
today’s language, more than most people do. She appeals to all ages,
I’ve found.”

You may have noticed that Ryan is using the pronoun
“she” to talk about Rohrer. Most people that I spoke to at Grace refer
to their pastor as “she.” Though Rohrer prefers to use the pronoun
“they” when possible, it’s not really an issue at church.

“I
really am much more interested in being someone’s pastor at the end of
the conversation than having them get my gender right,” Rohrer explains.
“My job as a pastor is to care more about what’s going in the person
I’m talking to than about what’s going on in my own life. And you can
imagine that throughout the lifespan of doing ministry with people, that
if your only concern was to think about what offended you, you would be
a really crappy pastor.”

Rohrer’s gender identity, or the fact
that their partner is a woman, was a non-issue for council president
Ryan when it came to choosing a new pastor.

“What she does in her private life is up to her,” says Ryan. “What she does in her church life is what’s important.”

Pam
Ryan, council president Sally Ann Ryan’s daughter, grew up at Grace.
She’s in her 30s now and has a teenage son. He doesn’t come to church
these days, because there are no other people his age. But she says
Rohrer’s fresh perspective may just bring her son back into the fold.

At
a free healthcare event the church held around Easter, the teen chatted
with the pastor about safe sex, and then got to help burn palms for
next year’s ashes.

“So he got to talk about condoms and lighting a
fire with our new pastor,” says Pam Ryan. “So he left here like, ‘Cool,
she’s cool!’”

Rohrer says that more than being a trans person, the radical thing about their presence is the age difference.

“You
could multiply my age times two and I would still be one of the younger
people in this congregation,” says Rohrer. “So I think it’s radical for
them to have a 34-year-old who’s hanging out at their congregation and
bringing life to them.”

But Rohrer says being publicly known as a church leader from a marginalized group comes with its own pressures.

“Most
people don’t know other trans pastors. When you’re of a very small
group there’s this sense that if you screw up, it means everybody who’s
like you is not okay. Or if you screw up they’re going to pass rules
saying transgender people can’t be pastors because that person screwed
up,” says Rohrer. “And so there’s something really beautiful about
people accepting you for the fullness of who you are so that you don’t
have to be a superhero all the time. You can be Clark Kent … I get to be
just a normal person who screws up the bulletin every once in a while,
you know?”

Despite the occasional typo in the weekly church
bulletin, Rohrer and Grace seem to be getting along just fine. Since the
new pastor arrived, the congregation has grown in membership by 34
percent. Rohrer says that number is “a fancy way of saying that the
congregation of sixteen grew by six people. But it sounds fancier in the
percentage.”

Rohrer recently underwent a trans-related surgery.
“I
let them know that I would be having surgery, that I wouldn’t be
sharing with them the nature of my surgery, and that if they guessed,
that was fine, but they shouldn’t tell me they figured it out,” says
Rohrer. “But it’s pretty obvious: I went from like a triple D to an A,
essentially.”

Rohrer says the congregation’s support during the
healing process was both touching and surprising like a 98-year-old
woman in the congregation who said, “Now that you’ve had this surgery,
what are your pronoun choices, and are you going to be changing your
name?”

Rohrer says they’re convinced that they’ve found the perfect pastoral fit at Grace Lutheran:
“People
who truly embody the word Grace. Never in a million years, in a million
years, did I think that I would be a part of a church that could
welcome me and allow me to be a pastor fully identifying as how I am.”

So
Pastor Megan Rohrer has found a spiritual home. And the Grace
congregation has found just the right shepherd to lead them on their
journey.

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The Rev. Dr. Megan Rohrer the pastor of Grace Evangelical Lutheran Church and Executive Director of Welcome - a communal response to poverty in San Francisco, CA. Pastor Megan is an author, artist, activist and educator who speaks and preaches nationally on issues of homelessness, sexuality and gender. Pastor Rohrer was a 2014 honorable mention as an Unsung Hero of Compassion with His Holiness the Dalai Lama, was named honorary royalty and presented a Medal of Tolerance in Indonesia, received an Honorary Doctorate from Palo Alto University, Distinguished Alum award from the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, is an award wining historian, musician, filmmaker and was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award in transgender nonfiction. ResumeSermon Archive